


a different kind of danger

by ThunderstormsandMemories



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, friends with benefits to exes who hook up to secret rivals to lovers, spoilers through pzn22, vague descriptions of injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:55:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24817201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThunderstormsandMemories/pseuds/ThunderstormsandMemories
Summary: fellas is it gay to take a bullet for your rival (yes)OR,Gucci and Clem participate in a little bit of piracy and it goes about as well as you would expect
Relationships: Gucci Garantine/Clementine Kesh
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	a different kind of danger

**Author's Note:**

> spoilers through Partizan 22

She never should’ve let Gucci talk her into going on this raid herself. Gucci’s arguments had been valid, to be sure, but it was still a mistake for Clem to allow her pride, and her desire to impress Gucci, to get the best of her. She still wasn’t fully recovered from her injury, and the subsequent botched surgery, still had days when she was too weak to do much more than sit at her desk and skim over reports, when her legs shook and threatened to buckle underneath her, when she felt tired and light-headed and nauseous at the thought of food. She was recovering, finally, and taking Fort Icebreaker combined with the relative success of the conference had done wonders for her mood.

And Gucci wasn’t wrong. Clem might have been a little bit… out of touch with the majority of the occupants of her base, but she still knew how they felt about her, especially her own squad. Leap and Milli, especially, had made their feelings unmistakably clear. She wasn’t oblivious to the resentment, the widespread idea that she wasn’t doing any of the work yet taking most of the credit (though delegating tasks and allotting supplies was more taxing than people tended to assume), or the possibility of a mutiny, simmering just under the surface, delayed for as long as she continued to give her blessing to piracy. Gucci had been right to say that as leaders they ought to lead by example, that they ought to do the things they sent their people to do, that their commitment could not be seen as any less than theirs.

Of course, it wasn’t exactly the strength of Gucci’s reasoning that had convinced Clem: it was that Gucci had decided to go on one of the raids herself, and Clem couldn’t stand to be shown up by her, especially not now that she knew Gucci was actually Saint Dawn, whom she’d clashed with before to a less-than-satisfactory outcome. This was about her professional pride, as a scion of Kesh and as the commander of the Rapid Evening, and nothing at all to do with the way her heart fluttered in her chest when Gucci smiled at her. Maybe that was a sign she was still too ill to be doing any more strenuous than some light reading, let alone leading (co-leading) a raid on an armed Orion shipping convoy.

The hallway was cramped and dimly lit, and Clem was torn between irritation that Gucci had gotten ahead of her and was therefore going to be perceived as more leaderly by the handful of prisoners, smugglers, and mercenaries who had accompanied them, and enjoying a moment of furtive admiration at how good Gucci looked in her form-fitting tactical gear. They’d left their mechs behind for this one, since Leap had claimed that stealth would serve them better than firepower, and as much as Clem loved the statement the Panther made, she was pathetically grateful to not have to worry about making such a fool of herself again, at least not in the same way.

And then they reached the door at the end of the hallway, and several things happened in quick succession, so rapidly that Clem only remembered them as disconnected snapshots: Gucci looking back at her, smirking, as she opened the door; Gucci, silhouetted in the flash of an explosion that threw them both backwards, tumbling into each other, legs tangling together as they tried to stand; bodies moving through the smoke, the sound of gunfire; Gucci back on her feet, once again charging forward, not noticing an enemy circling around behind her.

Clem wasn’t aware of managing to stand up again, only staggering and leaning on the wall for support, when she saw the danger Gucci was in. She tried to call out, but the smoke was too thick and her lungs too weak from her long convalescence for her to do much more than cough. The Orion soldier raised their gun and Gucci turned, noticing too late how exposed she was.

Clem tackled her to the ground as the shot rang out, and she didn’t even feel the pain at first. All she could think of, with Gucci pinned to the ground underneath her, was: _I wish that had happened in a more romantic situation_. She gave Gucci a shaky smile, vaguely aware that above them her people were winning the fight against the remaining Orion fighters, and she thought she should probably move but she couldn’t get her limbs to agree. And then her arms gave out and she collapsed fully on top of Gucci, who let out a soft sigh, her breath warm on Gucci’s cheek, and then said, “Clem? Clementine? Are you all right?”

“‘m fine,” Clem said, convincingly, trying to get up and only succeeding in rolling herself onto the floor. Laying on her side sent a sharp spasm of pain through her torso, and she tried to put herself onto her back, hoping in vain that it would make the pain subside. Her fingers felt weirdly numb as she poked at her abdomen, trying to figure out what the problem was, why she felt so light-headed, why her fingers came away warm and sticky.

“Clem!” Gucci sounded properly frantic now, leaning over Clem, her face very close, tears beading on her lovely long eyelashes, and Clem’s last thought as she passed out was: _what if I kissed her again._

_—_

Clem woke up with a dull ache in her side, a vague sense of embarrassment, and a horrible throbbing headache. She also didn’t wake up alone.

—

Gucci hadn’t slept at all since she’d carried Clem back to the transport ship, and she really didn’t want to think about what that had done to her sleep schedule, let alone her skincare routine. Their mission had been a success, technically: the other pirates—the ones who did this sort of thing regularly—had acquired all of the ammunition and dehydrated ration packs they’d expected to acquire, and no one had died. She hated that this was what she counted as a victory, when she still thought their rough coalition of revolutionaries ought to aim slightly higher, dream slightly bigger, maintain slightly loftier ambitions, but she would take what she could get, especially with Clementine Kesh so recently bleeding out in her arms.

One of Serikos’s people had patched her up with the limited resources on hand on the transport ship, and now all that was left to Gucci was to wait at her bedside for her to wake up as the ship made its way steadily back to Fort Icebreaker. Clem stirred slightly in her sleep, and Gucci leaned forward, on the edge of her creaky un-ergonomic folding chair. Her back was going to give her hell tomorrow. “Clem? How are you feeling?”

Clem made a soft sound that might have been either Gucci’s name or a noncommittal groan of pain and started moving as though she meant to sit up. Gucci, who had been assured by the medic that Clem’s wound wasn’t actually all that serious despite the frightening amounts of blood it produced, propped up more pillows behind her back, and Clem smiled gratefully, if a little less convincingly than she normally would. “Oh, hello,” said Clem. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“What were you thinking?” Gucci said.

“I wasn’t, really,” said Clem, sheepishly, starting to shrug before wincing in pain. “I just, you know, sort of acted. There was a situation, and I responded to it.”

“You idiot,” said Gucci. The blankets had fallen off of Clem’s torso as she sat up, her unzipped shirt revealing the bandages wrapped around her abdomen from just above her waistband to just below her bra.

“What do you mean?” Clem looked hurt—emotionally, now, not just her physical wound—and Gucci felt a stab of guilt. She’d meant that to sound fond, to express how worried she was, how unnecessary Clem’s rash action had been, but she supposed she should’ve known better. She knew Crysanth, she knew how rare it was for Clem to receive any genuine praise and that every remark was expected to contain at least three double-edged hidden meanings. “I thought you said I should be seeing more of the front lines, doing a bit more of my own dirty work instead of letting other people take the risks for me?”

“I didn’t mean for you to get yourself killed playing the hero,” Gucci said. “I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I just… I thought you were going to die.”

“Well, I didn’t,” said Clem, crossing her arms petulantly and pouting like she was a child at boarding school again, making excuses for why she hadn’t done her homework. When they were teenagers that had been terribly endearing, and Gucci would be lying to herself if she said that she didn’t still find it a little bit adorable.

“I know that,” she said, reaching out to touch Clem’s bandages and stopping herself at the last minute, her hand hovering over the faint outline of a bloodstain that had seeped through. “I was so worried about you. I’m not trying to insult your competence—honestly I’m very impressed by how well you’ve been handling all of this—” she waved her hand as if to encompass everything from leading the Rapid Evening to parting ways with her mother to taking Fort Icebreaker to participating in a revolution, “but you took a bullet for me and then passed out, so forgive me for having a bit of concern.”

“Okay,” Clem said, “I forgive you.” And then, taking Gucci’s hand and guiding it to her side, to the place just above her kidney where the shot had grazed her, she said, “It’s fine, it’s doesn’t hurt. It never did really, though to be fair I think that was mostly shock before and painkillers now.”

“You’re not exactly filling me with confidence,” Gucci said. Her hand was still on Clem’s stomach, and she could feel her breath rising and falling. “I’m the one who talked you into coming on this raid, and I’m the one you were trying to protect.” She very carefully avoided saying that she never would’ve expected that stunning lack of self-preservation from Clem, who had always, as long as she’d known her, put her own interests first. She had been surprised that Clem had deigned to join her on this mission in the first place, though the revelation that Clem was part of the Rapid Evening—piloting Jace Rethal’s old mech, somehow, albeit not very skillfully—had caused her to reevaluate her understanding of her friend’s capabilities and priorities. The Clem she had known at school had mostly used her ingenuity and her stubbornness to weasel her way of trouble, whether it was detention or a particularly difficult essay. The Clem she had known in Cruciat had possessed a faded version of her former charm, dulled by her mother’s constant energy-sapping presence, and still she had—at least to Gucci’s knowledge—mostly spent her time organizing parties where she made increasingly miserable appearances that would not have appeared as such to anyone who was less familiar with her moods. And if there was one thing Gucci had learned at boarding school, beyond algebra and state-sponsored propaganda and the power of social capital, it was how to read Clementine Kesh’s moods.

Except right now that skill was failing her. She didn’t know why Clem was looking up at her with such a depth of emotion in her eyes. She didn’t know why she hadn’t yet let go of her hand, or why her face was so flushed when the medic had assured Gucci there was no way Clem’s fever had returned. She thought she knew why Clem had insisted on joining her for this raid, but she didn’t know what had possessed her to take such a risk for Gucci’s sake. Gucci would have been fine; her body armor was stronger than anything some low-level Orion mercenary could throw at her, designed by the best of the best in a secret Horizon facility. She supposed Clem hadn’t know that, but still. Self-preservation had always been one of Clem’s defining traits, and there was something disconcerting about her abandoning it now.

“Yeah, well,” Clem said, and she was looking away, down, her disheveled hair falling across her face so Gucci couldn’t see her eyes, but one hand still pinned Gucci’s to her stomach. “You’re welcome.”

“Thank you,” said Gucci. “I owe you one.”

“I think we’re even, actually,” Clem said. “We’ve always been well-matched, haven’t we?”

Gucci hummed in agreement, though she wasn’t sure if Clem meant on the battlefield, which wasn’t necessarily true, or the ballroom, which was. And then she didn’t have a chance to reflect on that particular turn of phrase any further, because Clem was pulling her closer by the lapels of her combat jacket and kissing her, and her mouth was warm and insistent and only tasted a little bit of blood.

Kissing Clem now was nothing like their first kisses, awkward and clumsy, stolen moments between class or after rowing practice or the rare nights when they’d snuck into each other’s dorms and bribed their roommates to be elsewhere, telling themselves and each other that it was just a bit of fun between friends. It was nothing like hooking up with her in the back rooms of her parties in Cruciat, nostalgic and alcohol-fueled and mostly a way to escape the crushing boredom of making small talk with petty bureaucrats.

This kiss was nothing like that, like nothing that Gucci had ever felt before. Even if they hadn’t been evenly matched before, they were now, and there was something different about kissing Clem with the knowledge that she had been her secret opponent, that she was standing beside her now to rebuild their world together. In this kiss she felt the promise of a different side to Clementine Kesh, no longer the petulant student or the bratty socialite but a leader and a revolutionary. She still had a quite a ways to go, politically speaking, but Gucci was strangely proud of how far she’d come, though she knew that she personally had less to do with it than their new circumstances did. But for now, with Clem’s tongue in her mouth and Clem’s hand guiding hers from her stomach to her chest, all she could think of was possibility, was reshaping Partizan and the Principality with Clem by her side. And then Clem pulled her closer, and she stopped thinking entirely.

**Author's Note:**

> title from Delilah by Florence + the Machine
> 
> it’s that trope of patching up someone’s wounds that they incurred by risking their own life to save yours except you’re both rich girls who don’t do your own work so you outsourced the hard part and you’re just there for the yearning (I guess it’s pretty bold of me to assume that talking about your feelings isn’t the more difficult part of hurt/comfort huh)
> 
> Gucci in this fic has a lot more faith in Clem’s politics than I do but that’s mostly bc she’s real gay for her, I don’t know how she actually feels about her politics in the most recent episode because I’m not done with it yet oops, I meant to have this finished before the next episode came out but that. didn’t happen
> 
> come say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/s_artemisios) where I continue to lose my mind about Partizan and these disaster rival ladies


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